Designing for the Dispossessed

By ALASTAIR GORDON

Published: August 28, 2003

AT age 29, Cameron Sinclair was among the youngest speakers at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colo., last week. He nonetheless brought a full auditorium to its feet Thursday morning with a review of his work with Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit organization he started from his Manhattan studio apartment with a scattering of volunteers and a shoestring budget.

Over the last four years, Mr. Sinclair's group has helped generate programs and designs for disaster relief in 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Kosovo and South Africa.

Mr. Sinclair's talk, peppered with well-rehearsed lines (''All I ask is that they design like they give a damn'') was tailor-made for a design conference that took global concerns with safety as its theme.

''He has been a mainstay and hero of the conference,'' said Paola Antonelli, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a chairwoman of the conference. ''He's asking architects to take a risk and forget about immediate profits.''

Mr. Sinclair's appearance alongside more established design figures is evidence of a shift, particularly among students and younger designers, toward social responsibility.

''Would someone like me have been invited to speak here five years ago?'' Mr. Sinclair said. ''Probably not. But a lot of younger architects don't want to design doorknobs in boutique hotels anymore. They want to be engaged, they want to help find solutions to critical problems.''

Of course, Mr. Sinclair is not the only one generating designs for relief. The Rural Studio, based in Auburn, Ala., has helped provide housing for the rural poor since 1993, and Shelter for Life, a volunteer group based in Oshkosh, Wis., has built houses in Afghanistan. But through persistence, personal charm and a marriage to a journalist who writes press releases and grant proposals, Mr. Sinclair has managed to make himself the center of a global network of designers, engineers and relief groups.

Mr. Sinclair and his wife, Kate Stohr, 29, have gone a long way with limited means. He was laid off from his job as a project architect at Gensler a year ago, and has devoted himself to Architecture for Humanity full time ever since. ''Here we are doing health programs around the world,'' he said. ''And we can't afford health insurance for ourselves.''

Four days after 9/11, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees called Mr. Sinclair, he said, to tell him he was on a list of people that could be asked to help with the coming relief effort in Afghanistan. ''I told them I hope it's a long list,'' he said, ''because I'm a 28-year-old alone in my apartment.'' (He put them in contact with architects and engineers in Pakistan and other neighboring countries.)

During the 1960's and early 70's, young architects as a rule felt almost obliged to address issues like affordable housing and community planning. But by the time Mr. Cameron arrived at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in the late 1990's, these concerns had given way to a preoccupation with signature design and theory.

''I was the black sheep of my class,'' said Mr. Sinclair, who designed housing for the homeless as his thesis project. ''My fellow students were more interested in getting into Wallpaper magazine.''

He does not feel like a black sheep anymore. In the past two months, more than 120 people have applied to work for him as unpaid interns, most of whom had to be turned away.

''A lot of my generation is disillusioned,'' Mr. Sinclair said.

''You finish school, start with a big firm, and become a CAD monkey working in a little cubicle,'' he added, referring to computer-animated design. ''You're told that only one out of a hundred will make it as a name architect. That's depressing.''

Mr. Sinclair, who was raised in London, showed his organizational knack two years ago when he founded the ''Uncoordinated Soccer League'' in New York for unathletic designers, a dozen of whom ended up volunteering for his group.

In 1999, with a budget of just $700, Mr. Cameron held a competition to design transitional housing for refugees returning to Kosovo. He received nearly 300 entries from 30 countries, including a modern yurt built around a central column by the Oakland-based firm Basak Altan Design. ''Refugee shelter is usually a last-minute, ad hoc affair with little in the way of advance planning,'' Mr. Sinclair said. His goal was to provide shelters where refugees could live for years while rebuilding homes.

The jury, which included the architects Tod Williams, Billie Tsien and Steven Holl, picked 10 winners. Five prototypes were built, including a structure made of paper by Shigeru Ban of Tokyo and a shipping container lined with plywood by the Australian architect Sean Godsell.

Gans & Jelacic, a firm in New York, built a prototype of their entry, a triangular structure that pops up from a container with the help of a standard car jack.

I-Beam Design, another New York firm, designed a shelter made from wooden shipping pallets. ''We were looking for a simple solution and realized that supplies sent to disaster areas are often shipped on these pallets,'' said Azin Valy of I-Beam. ''We wanted a universal system that a child could put together.''

Ms. Valy and her partner, Suzan Wines, built a prototype in an abandoned lot in the South Bronx. Within weeks, a homeless man had moved in; and a week after that, the city had torn it down.